All the eyes in heaven spiral free
And come at last to earth.
Continents, divided by the sea,
In the sky, the crowded clouds permit descent;
Parting, light speed slowing, tumbling like atoms.
In our eyes, in our ever-flying eyes,
Through fire and mist, urgency stings like tears.
Sunrise bursts from the ocean’s edge,
Spawning its moments against the blue,
Beginning.
The waves’ advancing armies scatter foam,
Whipped up, aimless water,
A battle’s expendable dead,
Spent upon the far, wide sand.
Out of the darkness that is slung beneath the world,
Morning comes, pulling daylight from its stony sleep
Of water and sea-bed dreams.
Astride the Tropic of Cancer,
One foot in the Red Sea
The other on Zanzibar,
Time builds today from yesterday’s pieces.
Trees lean motionless in still air, dawn’s broken light lifting,
Shifting stabs of sun on the beachfront houses,
Creeping into shadow and through glassless windows.
Where air seeds itself in rooms, or twines in corners
The shape of the present grows, immediate, stark, fleeting,
Invisibly passing now from tick to tock,
The clockless universe like a pulse, like a bead,
A droplet of never-ending blood in the vessel of the hour
Again
Beginning.
In the shade of four plain walls, in rumpled bedding,
In a bed as wide as the sea, a woman sweats her worst.
In her, too, from her horizon to her shore,
Waves come muscular and strong.
She is fighting like morning, grasping for the light, trying
To bring a life to life, to begin a day, to begin anything,
Alone,
Beginning.
Faces half in shadow look down,
Concerned and busy with their hands.
Hands on her flesh, slick, wet, clean with effort,
Ease some pain.
Her screams dissolve,
Evolve agony into joy, come full circle.
Her cries put a name to God.
She speaks to Vishnu, Shiva, Kali.
Lord Arjuna’s arrow flies its downward, cunning arc.
The germ of love, hidden so long,
Nurtured in flesh, protected,
A child breaks surface,
Finds his own light, emerges breathless.
Silence brings the tired moment to an end.
Silence. Waiting. Patience.
A midwife’s hand brushes hair from the woman’s face.
The quiet child, dead to the world,
Not yet in it, keeps his peace
The morning dares not breathe,
The sun pauses above its bed between the waves,
The surf inhales, then a grain of sand,
Beachblown by insolent wind
Avalanches movement again.
Where air seeds itself in rooms, or twines in corners
The shape of the present grows, immediate, stark, fleeting,
Invisibly passing now from tick to tock,
The clockless universe like a pulse, like a bead,
A droplet of never-ending blood in the vessel of the hour
Again
Beginning.
In the shade of four plain walls, in rumpled bedding,
In a bed as wide as the sea, a woman sweats her worst.
In her, too, from her horizon to her shore,
Waves come muscular and strong.
She is fighting like morning, grasping for the light, trying
To bring a life to life, to begin a day, to begin anything,
Alone,
Beginning.
Faces half in shadow look down,
Concerned and busy with their hands.
Hands on her flesh, slick, wet, clean with effort,
Ease some pain.
Her screams dissolve,
Evolve agony into joy, come full circle.
Her cries put a name to God.
She speaks to Vishnu, Shiva, Kali.
Lord Arjuna’s arrow flies its downward, cunning arc.
The germ of love, hidden so long,
Nurtured in flesh, protected,
A child breaks surface,
Finds his own light, emerges breathless.
Silence brings the tired moment to an end.
Silence. Waiting. Patience.
A midwife’s hand brushes hair from the woman’s face.
The quiet child, dead to the world,
Not yet in it, keeps his peace
The morning dares not breathe,
The sun pauses above its bed between the waves,
The surf inhales, then a grain of sand,
Beachblown by insolent wind
Avalanches movement again.
© BH, 2013
This is the beginning of something. Of what, I can't say. As it stands, it's a moment in time. Culmination or origin, who knows?
I wrestled with words for it, many ending in '-genesis'.
We'll see…
Oh, and I tweaked the lines to look better here. Aesthetics.
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